(I guess we'll call June an off month. Maybe July can hold out a little better. But I'm working bakery hours and writing suffers.)
Marianne, the leftish wing weekly magazine that's cheaper then the others and sells very well, has just compared Sarkozy to Napoleon the Third. It sounds a bit cartoonish and facile, but they have a point. Sarkozy's ambitions and sense of self seem slightly foreign to what you'd expect of a modern democracy. He's clearly rethought the French presidency that he's wrested from the clutches of Chirac, but he isn't really modernising it.
By comparing him to Bonaparte's nephew, Marianne the magazine captures the 19th century dictators success in uniting the country under a banner of efficiency and forward thinking. Before Napoleon, was chaos or if not chaos, a hapless king (Chirac!). Napoleon III offered a worthy consensus: Order and a dynamism perfectly calibrated to the needs of the capitalists and other powers that be, without altogether forgetting what the French call la sociale, the common folk.
Now that he's super President, Sarkozy has adopted this manner. He's more emperor than president. He's an enlightened one to be sure. He's not about to set up political prisons, or snuff out opponents. But the engines are all tuned to erasing the opponents by sheer momentum, and in its own benign way, that feels non-democratic. Because momentum doesn't give the crowd and the media that feeds them time to think. Momentum turns the nation into followers, and followers never criticize because they're too busy finding the other sock. With Sarkozy running fast ahead, France is looking for its socks.
But what has he done so far? The deal in Brussels last week has been blown quite out of proportion. An agreement was in fact signed, but not one that even begins to address the absurdities that make referendums on Europe so dangerous to the continent's national leaders.
If Sarkozy had to actually put whatever ends up being agreed to based on last weeks talks to a referendum, he'd have to spend every last drop of his quite substantial political capital on getting it passed and even then, who knows. All the boasting last week was simply for having done his homework on time; no one really looked to see if it was any good or worthwhile.
In fact, if anything seems clear about the Europe of right now, is that national personalities are leading the way and not an idea. whether Poland's fabulous Kasynski brothers, dour Gordon Brown, or effervescent Sarkozy, Europe has become a corridor of national heroes and heroines happily cutting out what they can from Brussels. Europe, in any ideological sense, is still pretty dead. The momentum is not there.
No, the real show is still back at home, symbolized by the one polish twin in Brussels always having to check by satellite with the other twin in Warsaw on what he should concede to in the negotiations. Or, also captured by France's new sort-of emperor, Nicolas the First, who presides over everything that he sees while his county hurries to catch up.
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